A Tale of Lockdown Folk

Suppose we invent a fictional UK Prime Minister with an eye to producing a film script loosely based on real events during the coronavirus pandemic. We’ll call our fictional Prime Minister Matt who became Prime Minister at roughly the same time as Boris Johnson.

To kick off we’ll jump straight into a flashback and ask Prime Minister Matt why he went for a lockdown policy when faced with the coronavirus pandemic. Suppose the script as currently written requires the PM to be strongly influenced by three fictional scientists we’ll call Dr Ben, Professor Tim and Professor Hugh plus a tough political advisor we’ll call Frank.

Lurking in the background is a rabidly negative national TV channel, a curious mix of flinty woke puritanism and senile depravity. In which case, external pressures already suggest that our fictional Prime Minister may struggle to play any real part in pandemic policy apart from acting as its mouthpiece.

We could say that policy formulation was entirely divorced from democratic control, but that’s an aside. We may or may not use it in the final version of the script. Someone could shout it and bang the table while being ignored.

Moving on, we could attempt to write some depth into our fictional account of high level pandemic policy making. We could delve into motives, professional expertise, disagreements, furious rows, shouting, slammed doors, the role of dominant personalities and insatiable media hunger for drama. Fly on the wall stuff.

We could also probe the wider political process by asking how Dr Ben, Professor Tim and Professor Hugh came to see lockdown as the only possible pandemic policy. We could explore the professional reasoning behind their expert advice, the influence of colleagues and other minor characters plus the edgy political input from Frank and the tight group of people he listens to. Not forgetting that woke TV channel of course.

In other words, the fictional lockdown policy is derived from influences well beyond Dr Ben, Professor Tim, Professor Hugh and even Frank. None of them climbed to their current positions in a vacuum. They all absorbed influences from their social and professional circles and became products of those influences. We’ll call some of the more important of those secondary fictional influences Dr Joe, Professor Stella and Hardly University. May as well throw in a difficult childhood somewhere too. And some sexism.

Even though this is all fiction, at some point we may wish to tease out the deeper reasoning behind the lockdown policy instead of cataloguing influences. The problem is we keep extending the catalogue of influences and it is not clear how we get away from that. How do we dig deeper instead of slapping on the drama with a trowel?

How about sex? Well we may as well bung in a couple of bedroom scenes, but as we know that’s just to lift the movie rating. We still don’t know how Dr Joe, Professor Sue and Hardly University really came to play such a key backroom role in the UK coronavirus policy which cost billions of pounds.

The End.

That’s the end of this fictional account of the source of UK coronavirus policy. We’ve outlined the story but there is no tidy ending. There is no ultimate answer to the original question - why did Prime Minister Matt go for a lockdown policy? We don’t need that though, the story hangs together as a drama without the really difficult questions being answered.

Of course, anyone who wishes to could easily expand this fictional account with some deeper analysis of scientific findings, published research, seminars, epidemiological models, the psychology and personalities of key actors, social pressures, economic considerations and so on. But this is fiction, not the real life drama of Boris Johnson’s actual role as UK Prime Minister.

In which case we have another question. What is the difference between the fictional account and what actually happened in real life? We would have to follow much the same kind of narrative with real people, real research and real institutions. As with the fictional account, it is not clear how the catalogue of influences comes to an end. It is not clear how we could ever come to an unambiguous conclusion as an answer to our original question – why did the UK Prime Minister go for a lockdown policy?

We could quite easily formulate a real world answer just as we could formulate a fictional answer in the fictional version. We could formulate any number of answers in both cases. The problem seem to be that there is little difference between the real and the fictional.

We hear that Boris initially favoured a far less stringent policy, but most people probably would at that time. There appears to be no deeper story to be teased out of a morass of information. A deeper story doesn’t exist and no amount of psychological speculation will give us anything beyond psychological speculation.

There is no ultimate personal reason why Boris Johnson opted for a lockdown policy other than a simple story of external pressures and political necessity. It would have pushed anyone else in the same direction, whatever people may claim now.

The lockdown decision effectively emerged of its own accord, as the only politically plausible narrative. A far less damaging approach was not tried because it was obviously not politically plausible. Not in the UK. There is nothing deeper to be extracted. It was all based on the throw of a heavily loaded dice.

The lockdown decision was essentially shallow because we are all essentially shallow. Boris and co. are not likely to have waded through hundreds of pages of scientific discussion, graphs and projections. An hour or so of discussion was probably enough. That is not to say that the policy took an hour to formulate, but at executive summary level that would have been enough if we extract the human need for reassurance. There may have been buckets of that.

But in the end it was a shallow decision because it had to be. They mostly are. We lose billions and wreck cultures quite casually. And we’ll do it again.